Custom Typeface and Logo Redesign for Tumblr
They removed Tumblr’s period right before the platform’s collapse.
Dinamo collaborated with Tumblr’s in-house creative studio to create a bespoke version of their ABC Favorit typeface, tailored for the platform’s brand and product design needs. The project included refining Tumblr’s logo for improved legibility and cohesion across digital environments, resulting in a crisp, geometric, and flexible visual identity.
Set in ABC Favorit
Insights
- Dinamo removed the full stop that had sat in Tumblr's logo for more than a decade, so the mark could sit openly, without finality — an ending taken out of the sentence rather than a shape redrawn.
- Dinamo spent roughly eighteen months building a bespoke version of ABC Favorit for Tumblr, down to rounded punctuation and geometric forms. A hidden display behavior, originally called “Rock’n’Roll mode” and later renamed Connected, merges the first and last letters of a word with an underline.
- Tumblr even built a dedicated iOS tool just to test the typeface, showing how deeply the identity was integrated into product design rather than treated as a simple brand refresh.
- The redesign landed in August 2018, just months before Tumblr banned adult content in December 2018; traffic collapsed, and by the next year Verizon sold the platform for about $3 million after Yahoo had paid around $1.1 billion.
- Typography did the strategic work here: crisp, flexible, and cohesive across digital environments, and loaded with symbolic intent — in a media brand whose fortunes changed almost immediately after launch.
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